You are here

More than meat & potatoes

Toronto quartet Jane’s Party plans a sophomore album with a more developed sound

Jane’s Party caught the attention of New York bloggers Pretty Much Amazing, who called the band’s single “Alone Together, “ off their self-titled EP, “absolutely contagious with a chorus that is impossible to forget.”

Credit:

Supplied

When you look at the Facebook page for indie-pop band Jane’s Party, everything is pretty much what you would expect from an up-and-coming group — except their only interest is Scrabble.

“We had a long tour out east to Newfoundland and back and we were all crammed into a van and I think [drummer] Zach [Sutton] happened to have his iPhone on him,” bassist Devon Richardson said. “We just downloaded the Scrabble app and we would just play it for hours and hours on end, just for the long, long drives.”

Clearly Jane’s Party isn’t your typical pop quartet, with Richardson describing the band’s sound as “honest pop.” “There’s no goals, there’s no objectives, we just want to write pop music,” he said. “We just have a passion for it, so that’s what comes out whenever we write.”

Jane’s Party hopes to release a full length album in the fall that will build on some of what the group created in their September EP Jane’s Party.

“Just more sounds, a little more broader,” he said. “Not so straight meat and potatoes; guitar, bass and drums. We’d like to experiment a little bit more than what we did on our EP, but still keep the pop, the indie-pop vibe going.”

While the band isn’t completely changing their sound, they’re on the hunt for a new instrument.

“We’ve been on the market, scouring Craigslist looking for the right synths to try and get some synths into our sound,” Richardson said. “Tastefully though, we’re not going to become some electro-pop band. Just a synth once and a while to add a bit of texture.”

Richardson said the creative process for Jane’s Party has been made easier by technology.

“If I’m coming up with an idea, I’ll record it on my laptop,” he said. “Then I’ll email it to [guitarist] Tom [Ionescu] and be like, ‘Yo, what do you think of this?’” he said. “Sometimes it’s a full song that I’ve written that I’m presenting to him, sometimes it’s just a chorus with no verses.”

While technology is making music more accessible, Richardson said it’s also making it more competitive.

“You have to be really good to stand out from the pack, because anyone with a laptop and a $20 guitar can put out an album,” he said.

The band won’t be playing the Mansion tomorrow night due to a mix-up with dates, but they hope to be back in late March or early April.

“We play Clark Hall all the time,” he said, “And the bar staff there is super cool. People at Clark Hall have always been amazing to us, so how can we not want to go back there as often as possible?”